


you are the forest (and i am the flame)

by ura_nium



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Bromance, Dead People, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Romance, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-15 01:13:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8036464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ura_nium/pseuds/ura_nium
Summary: Dying sucks.





	1. 1

Dying sucks.

Is the only thing on Stiles' mind when he comes face to face with his psychotic, ancient, demon twin and watches, all deer-caught-in-a-speeding-vehicle's-headlights-esque, as the (dying) thing lets out the most grotesque gurgle known to mankind. This is definitely not him. Absolutely, positively not him but it doesn't feel like it. There is a painful tugging around his navel which is joyously accompanied heavy thrumming of his god-awful migraine while he watches Kira twist her skewer grimly, making her Not-Stiles-Kebab eek out a pitiful squeak as she wrenches the instrument right out.

As it jerks like 10,000 volts of electricity is running through it, Stiles hopes with all his heart that this is not how he looks like when he flails about.

He barely notices the firefly that Not-Stiles (Void Stiles, Dark Stiles, What-the-fudge-is-with-your-decaying-teenage-complexion Stiles) exhales and instead watches it seize painfully, before collapsing into a dead, cracked heap on the ground. His senses are not quite there, seeing how he himself is also almost-dying and has not been able to feel anything but incredibly cold for the last 24 hours, but as the entity's last breath ghosts (hah) over him, just before it falls, he gets a whiff of the thousand-year-old rot originating from its demonic alimentary canal. It smells as bad as it sounds and the stench lingers longer than it should, as if part of the ailing demon-vessel was making one last claw at its lookalike.

Sorry we are all out of Stiles-es for you to possess today. Please try again later--

It is over within a split-second, but Stiles feels like the whole ordeal of watching himself die ate 10 years off his already short life. It is not a pleasant feeling, and Stiles feels like the ground is rushing up to meet him.

Oh wait. The ground is actually rushing up to meet him.

That's why he unceremoniously blacks out again after running out into the (coldcoldcold) autumn wind and watching Lydia's boyfriend die and tugging Lydia into an embrace in attempt to shield her from the heart-breaking reality with his frail, broken human body. And then pulling away to say something when his everything gives out.

At least this time, Scott catches him.

\-----

Dying sucks.

Almost dying sucks more.

\-----

He wakes up to the sight of a very familiar ceiling and several very familiar smells. There is an elephant sitting on his chest and his insides are freezing and unfreezing every 5 seconds and it is not a comfortable feeling. He can't feel his hands. Someone is crying.

So he goes back to sleep.

 -----

The second time around he can move so he sits up and regrets it because suddenly he can't breathe and he's falling back down and his chest explodes in a full-blown panic attack because of course he's panicking.

Stiles thinks maybe the nurses try to tranq him but Melissa comes banging in, screaming orders while his father walks (runs) to his bedside and whispers fiercely to him while he holds him tightly until the attack finally relinquishes its iron grip on his faculties.

He almost pisses his pants because of this and the feeling makes him cry because he's scared and everything is not ok. Everything is not ok and he's a 17 year-old boy stuck in the self-destructing body of a victim of sick sort of emotional and spiritual assault. All because he wanted was to save his dad and his best friends' parents from death by ritual sacrifice and his hometown from getting fried from being overloaded with supernatural occurrences.

Now he's two dead friends richer and coming apart like a withering dandelion.  
  
He cries himself to back sleep. His father's watch says takes about an hour and he feels every second of it like three-thousand-six-hundred needles stabbing one by one into his heart.


	2. 2

In his dreams he falls headfirst in a black pit and finds himself neck-deep in a cesspool of warm, sticky, black blood. It smells like decaying fish and burning metal. Allison is already there and she floats beside him and helps him count the number of clawed hands reaching down for them with her rotting hand.

\-----

He wakes up screaming.

\-----

The elephant on his chest turns out to be broken ribs from the CPR that Scott administered after he fainted for the second time, post-nogistune-slaying-and-Aiden-dying. Apparently, that second time? He stopped breathing and his heart gave up beating. Stiles thinks he should be more scared with the fact that he was formally, clinically dead for five minutes, but broken ribs are a bitch so he didn't have much energy to think that far.

Also, he contracts a slight flu which results in a hacking cough and sporadic but mild fevers. His doctors projects its likely because the hospital is a effin breeding ground for germs and definitely not because his body is totally stressed out from playing house to a thousand-year-old demon. It will go away quickly enough when he is discharged, they promise.

Well, still better than dying. Or almost dying. He keeps the cough (his dad doesn't need an extra thing to worry about) and the ribs heal.

\-----

He convinces his dad to take on the night shifts again mostly because he doesn't want him to see him wake up perspiring profusely and crying for his mother, for Boyd and for Erica and Allison and everyone who is not coming back.

\-----

Scott does not come to see him until after Allison's funeral. He comes with Kira, who goes up to Stiles as soon as she enters and presses a quick, firm kiss on his temple (surprising) before slipping out quietly, fingers brushing sympathetically against his best friend's shaking hands (not so surprising).

He wants to talk about his dream, but he looks at Scott but Scott doesn't look at him, doesn't say anything to him, so instead Stiles splays open his palms like a surrender and places them on his lap. From the way that the kid's shaking, he knows that his best friend has been holding it all in. So he whispers, "Just get it over with already, man."

That is all it takes, really.

Every sob his bestbestbest friend lets out while pressed against him makes his chest hurt but he holds on tight anyway.

\-----

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next few chapters will be longer than the first two. Thanks for the Kudos and the bookmarks! Do let me know what you think in the comments if you can :) Thanks for reading!


	3. 3

Lydia is really good at climbing trees.

Not that anyone is aware. Tree-climbing skills are not something people are prone to keying into their college portfolio. But Stiles knows this is a fact because when they were in kindergarten he once saw her scale a huge, spindly-branched, green-leafed one on the outskirts of the playground in order to get away from several rowdy individuals that were hounding her. She did it in her favourite olive mary-janes and a bright blue summer dress, her hair up in two braids and a grin on her dirt-streaked face.

After the bullies gave up and left, She slid down to the lowest fork between the branches and then to the ground. She landed like a cat, only stopping to threaten Stiles that if he'd ever told anybody what he saw that day, he wouldn't live to see his 5th birthday before traipsing off to the washroom to wash her face and rejoining Lucy on the swing set.

Stiles thinks that is the exact moment he fell in love with her. Maybe that's why they're in such a weird place in their relationship now.

He isn’t surprised when she appears in his room on the third storey of the hospital’s East Wing (Accident and Trauma, whoopee) on one of his lucid nights where he's actually managed to stay up past 11pm (and is absolutely determined to stay awake because his ribs can't take anymore crying) and crawls on his bed to join him in watching midnight reruns of Doctor Who.

He tries to open his mouth and speak to her, but she silences him with a “Breathe a word, Stilinski, and I will call in the nurse to give you a sedative.” It’s an empty threat, just like the one she made 12 years ago, but he sees the tenderness around her bloodshot eyes, notices that her skirt is all crumpled (not from climbing that gigantic tree outside his window), and that her hair is not styled and uncombed.

He lets her curl into his side and her warm tears burn then cool rapidly on his slightly fevered skin as tiny fat globules march through London in the direction of Adipose Industries.

It is after that, when he feels Lydia'a breaths even out and the TV blares the credit sequence of DW, that the reality of her condition strikes him. Lydia has no one to turn to. Scott's all caught up in his grief, Kira is still a little far removed when it comes to the main dynamics of their pack, Isaac gone, Derek and Ethan nowhere to be found, and her mother is not privy to everything she is caught up in. 

Her only two confidants are dead.

There is not much else he can do, but hold her tighter and pretend his heart is not doubling up in agony over a renewed sense of loss and despair. He wakes her up before the first round of medication comes in at 6 and she leaves the same way she came, but not before sealing his lips with hers and whispering a thank you.

\-----

Lydia comes and goes several more times after that night, in the same way. Stiles doesn’t know what it means but his hospital bed feels unbearably empty as the sun breaks through branches that brush against the glass and the nurse closes the crack in the window she always leaves.

When Lydia comes by he doesn't sleep. The problem is when she doesn't come.

His nightmares are getting worse.

\-----

Isaac sits beside him on the edge of the woods and they admire the brightly lit landscape of Beacon Hills in the evening.

Until the sun drops from the sky and suddenly the town is sinking into the earth and everything is breaking apart. There is no moon in the sky and he can hear the screams of the people as he turns to Isaac and there is a wolf sitting in his place, eyes glowing a murderous gold.

'I'm sorry,' he tries to say as Isaac howls and everyone he knows emerge from the forests as wolves, and proceed to rib him limb from limb. The wolves whisper their taunts to him as they rip and tear relentlessly at warm flesh. They all blame him and it is as excruciating as it sounds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eventually when this piece is complete, I will compile everything into one chapter, because I think it flows better that way. I just need to put it out there to kind of motivate myself to write, or get some inspiration as to how to end this thing... either way, I hope you enjoyed this chapter! comments are always welcome, I'd love to hear from you. Till then, thanks for reading!


	4. 4

He is discharged after less than two weeks. Apparently even broken ribs, a badly bruised lung, and near-death from multiple organ failure is not a good enough reason to keep you in the hospital for extended periods of time once they decided you were not going to die anytime soon. Especially when what put you in the hospital is a very ambiguous-sounding car accident. Especially if you can't afford it.

Especially since you look scarily like the ring leader of that creepy group of terrorists that attacked the hospital and the police station and killed no less than five people.

\-----

Scott is his welcome home party and they both struggle to smile as they embrace. They play one round of Halo on Stiles' X-box and spend the next three hours talking about school and how Malia is now being tutored Lydia so she can get into their grade. They talk about Chris and Isaac being gone (but don't talk about how Isaac might not come back).  
  
(They also don't talk about Allison and Aiden but to be fair neither do they talk about Derek who no one has seen for a week now. )

Physio is still something he has to attend for a one or two more months, but he opts for the learn-what-to-do-and-how-to-do-it-at-home so he doesn't need to be ferried back and forth from the hospital.

Recovery bleeds into December. School restarts for him and Stiles spends most of his time with Scott and occasionally Lydia, or feeling horribly alone, sitting in the middle of a crowded room with no one he knows.

  
\-----

He wakes up nightly now, heaving (this is new) (thank God his ribs are mostly healed) and throwing up whatever is in his digestive system from that days special course of night terrors.

While his father works the night shift, he works through this. He's a big boy, he can handle this by himself.

\-----

The solution is surprisingly simple. Genius actually.

It occurs to him after a few nights of waking up to puke his guts out. He just doesn't need to sleep. Or at least he doesn't sleep long enough to enter REM sleep. And he won't dream.

Cue an oddly nostalgic 4am research frenzy to sort out and gauge what his sleeping patterns are like, which is a pain right up his nether regions because why the hell did you stay up to ungodly hours on school days and subsequently sleep till noon on weekends, and in such a sporadic way, Stilinski? Now he regrets not following his dad's order to go the hell to sleep in freshman year when he first started happily wrecking havoc on his (now completely non-existent and inconsistent) sleep pattern.

Eventually he just gives up and decides to give the whole thing a spin. Experiment a little. Test out different timings. What's the harm in that?

\-----

Turns out it needed about 3 more nights of sporadically waking up at gradually increasing intervals, until it hit a point where he descended into some fresh hell he'd rather not discuss, thank you very much. And he gets a pretty much reasonable gauge of what his sleep cycle is like. Now all he has to do was wake regularly via his newly constructed alarm clock which consisted of several very alarming things to made sure he most definitely woke up, without a doubt. Let's just say that there is electricity involved and no, it's not Kira and it will not kill him, he experimented on that too. (Ungodly Morning Experimental Sessions with Stiles Stilinski, hurrah.)

Now he won't see his dead friends. He also won't see his alive friends with his dead friends blaming him for the latter's lack of existence and he won't have to blame himself for all that they have lost.

It is a situation where no one loses out. Not really.

 

**Author's Note:**

> To be continued. This is my first time writing for this fandom, so do let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!


End file.
